


Accented Interest

by sixbeforelunch



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-03-07
Updated: 2007-03-07
Packaged: 2017-10-07 04:37:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/61475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixbeforelunch/pseuds/sixbeforelunch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by a meta discussion of Daniel's childhood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Accented Interest

"Long Island," Daniel said.

"Really?" Jack put another round of beers out on the coffee table. "Shouldn't you have an accent or something?"

Daniel smiled. "Everyone has an accent, Jack."

"Don't be pedantic," Jack said.

"Pedantic?"

"You'd prefer snippy?"

"Why don't you have a Long Island accent Daniel?" Sam asked, to spare herself episode five hundred and six of the Jack and Daniel show.

"My foster parents had a place in upstate New York, about fifty miles from the Canadian border. We spent a lot of time there. Whole summers, sometimes. Then when I went to college, I picked up sort of a mid-western accent." Daniel said.

"Did you like them?" Sam asked.

Daniel picked up a pretzel and started breaking it into pieces, not eating. Sam hoped she hadn't made him too uncomfortable. "My foster parents? Sure. They were...they were really good people. Tina was a friend of my mom's, from the university. After Nick decided not to take me she said she would. They were going to adopt me, but I wouldn't let them."

"Why not?" Jack asked.

Daniel was quiet for a long time. Sam almost changed the subject, but she wanted to know too. "I already had parents," he said finally.

Sam nodded. She would have hated the idea of someone trying to come in and replace her mother.

"Anyway," Daniel said. "They had a lot of money. My parents did okay. Tenured, you know. But Tina and Mike...Tina was a professor, like my mom, and Mike was a senior partner at some huge law firm in Manhattan. They had the house on Long Island, plus an apartment off of Central Park and the vacation house. It was..."

"Sweet?" Jack suggested.

"Weird," Daniel said. "Coming from our little one story house and our beat up station wagon to this whole other lifestyle. I had a hard time relating to their kids."

"Did you get along with them?" Sam asked.

Daniel took a long swallow of beer. "Not really," he admitted finally. "They really hated me at first, mostly because Tina was spending so much time with me. I was...a little messed up. But then they put me in therapy and that helped...a lot, actually. Tina started spending more time with her own kids again and they stopped hating me and started ignoring me. It worked out well." He smiled when he said it, but Sam thought she could see some long buried hurt in his eyes.

"Do you talk to them anymore?" Sam asked.

Daniel sighed. "No. Tina died of heart disease about ten years ago. Mike and I were never close and Sue and Greg--their kids--couldn't care less about me. I haven't seen them since Tina's funeral."

Sam squeezed his shoulder, but Daniel didn't seem to notice.

"So, to answer your original question, Jack, no I didn't travel much as a kid. Actually, until I was nineteen, the most exposure to foreign culture that I got was the few times that we crossed the border into Canada."

"Wait a minute," Jack said. "Weren't you born in Greece?"

Daniel smiled, a genuine smile this time. "Yeah. That."

"What?" Sam asked.

"Um...my mom decided to fly to Greece when she was eight months pregnant. I never got the whole story of why they decided to take the risk. Something about an old friend and a translation. I ended up coming three weeks early and...well. I was only there for a week. I don't remember it, obviously."

Sam smiled. "I always had this picture of you as traveling the world as a kid. You seem so comfortable in new situations, I guess."

Daniel shook his head. "That came later, after I started to do field work. I had a pretty boring childhood. Except for..." He took another long swallow of beer. "So what about you, Sam? You must have traveled a lot."

"We moved a lot. Air Force brat. New school every year," Sam said.

"Must have been hard," Daniel said.

Sam shrugged. She didn't like to talk about it much, but Daniel probably didn't like to talk about his childhood either. Shutting him out now seemed unfair. "You get used to it. You learn how to be the new kid. I didn't have many friends, by choice. I got tired of leaving them behind. Around the time my mom died, things settled down. I went to the same high school, all four years. I wasn't very popular, at first. I had already learned to not make friends and that was hard to unlearn."

"Plus you were...smarter than them," Jack said.

Sam winced. "Yeah. AP classes. I was taking math at a local college. That didn't help. But then I started to run track and I learned how to make friends. It was good after that." She smiled. "I could have graduated early, but I knew I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy and I had to wait until I was old enough anyway so I didn't let them skip me ahead. I'm glad I didn't. I went to the prom. I would have been prom queen if Valerie Reynolds hadn't worn the worlds lowest cut dress and flirted her way to the title."

Was she still bitter about that? Whoops. Daniel was smirking at her. She threw a pretzel at him.

"But traveling? Not really. My dad traveled so much for work that when he had down time we just stayed home. I liked that, actually."

"My dad used to do a family vacation every summer," Jack said. "Two weeks in a car driving to some family-friendly destination. Grand canyon. Yellowstone. All the cliched stuff. I didn't leave the US until I went to Tijuana the week before I left for the Air Force. I got drunk and arrested. It was a good time."

"Teal'c told me that he's been using the stargate since he was a kid," Daniel said. "His dad was first prime of Cronus, so they had more privileges that most Jaffa. They used to go on...well, he didn't exactly call it a family vacation, but that's what it sounded like to me. Anyway. His whole family would go through the gate to other planets sometimes."

Sam had a sudden vision of packing up the kids and a cooler and walking through the event horizon.

"Inter-stellar family togetherness," Jack said. "Now that's cool."


End file.
